How to purge your team’s pipeline of bad-fit deals

Why salespeople sell internally

Has a rep ever tried to convince you that a bad account was good? Or insisted that a contact with no authority or budget could purchase in-month? Odds are, you’ve been sold to.

This happens because sales reps are under immense pressure to get deals done. Sometimes, they apply their selling power internally to whatever seems like it’s blocking them – even you. This isn’t exactly their fault.

Sales isn’t just about talent – it’s also about perception

They know that sales isn’t just about talent – it’s also about perception. If it comes down to pursuing a bad deal or showing up to an end-of-month meeting empty-handed, it can take a lot of willpower not to grab their best bad-fit deal, swing for the fences, and commit to it.

When that happens, that rep then spends, say, the last two days of the month – effectively 10 percent of their working time – “pursuing” a dead deal and betting against the odds.

While you can get involved and help them call BS, it’s a huge waste of your time and theirs.

Getting better data can help you both – a lot.

Let the data do the talking

Salespeople can only sell internally when your sales data is bad. That is, if your CRM is full of inaccurate or incomplete information, reps have miles of wiggle room to make a case for why a potential loser is a big winner; nobody really knows.

The more ambiguous the data, the more they can actually start to believe in their own bad deal. And it isn’t all that hard to get convinced. They fall victim to confirmation bias, also known as ‘happy ears,’ which is where they see all the reasons why a deal will close and ignore the obvious reasons why it won’t.

Sales reps sometimes hear what they want to hear.

But if you tighten up your data quality, reps completely change their behavior.

Use a data provider like EverString and you’ll get data that’s actually accurate enough to score your accounts. Plenty of systems (including some CRMs) now offer lead or account scores but if they’re based on bad data from legacy data providers, they’re inaccurate and few sales teams fully trust them.

Build a list known as a FIRE Dashboard, short for “Fit, Intent, Relationship, and Engagement,” our qualification model here at EverString. This dashboard shows your very highest priority accounts. Your reps can pursue this pre-approved list.

Make it much more difficult for reps to convince you (or themselves) that an account with a low score is worthwhile.

There will always be exceptions. Not every closed-won deal will always score high. But you can run the numbers and see for yourself. Many companies find that more accurate data combined with better scoring is an absolute game-changer.

EverString customer Terminus did the math and found that 90 percent of the team’s revenue over the past year came from accounts ranked as A or B.

Save the selling for the prospects

Want to purge more of those bad-fit deals from your team’s pipeline? Get good enough data to score your accounts and make internal selling difficult.

With less rationale to hang onto bad-fit accounts, reps will happily focus on the true measure of their performance and go find the real deals.